My Favourite Holiday Kirsty Wark

Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark has been putting the nation’s politicians on the spot for the past 20 years.

But the Glasgow-based mum-of-two has also shown her homelier side by rising to the challenge of the Great British Bake Off and cooking up a storm as a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef.

Kirsty, 58, who’s married to STV’s Head of Content Alan Clements, has just finished her first novel, Other Women’s Flowers, which is set on the Isle of Arran. It’ll be published early in 2014.

And she’ll be looking forward to the Edinburgh Festival next month as her 21-year-old son James who has been studying acting at university in New York is starring in the play Dear Friend, which is at the capital’s Greenside Theatre.

The couple also have a daughter, Caitlin, 22, who is studying at Edinburgh University.

“I absolutely love big feats of engineering and to see the Hoover Dam during a road trip across America was brilliant.

We started in Los Angeles because my husband Alan had worked there for two years.

He joined us after we’d been around the area for a week and then we started to drive east. It was five days of driving with the music on before getting to Denver.

We went through all these states which was so interesting for the kids who had only ever really been in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

You realise that America is a place apart. Some folk don’t see other people for weeks on end and often they don’t even read newspapers.

There are several different Americas and it was wonderful to be there with the children and see them witness that.

We stayed with friends in Denver and then flew onto Toronto and went to one of my favourite places on the whole trip. We stayed in a clapboard house on a little spit out into Lake Joseph and it was just the most magical place.

Most of my childhood recollections are from Scotland and Ireland but I have a false memory of some of them.

I remember doing a piece about a favourite place being the Renvyle House Hotel in Connemara.

It’s this beautiful Edwardian hotel set in stunning countryside. I went out fishing and it was the first time I had soda bread and mussels.

But after that a childhood friend had got in touch saying she’d found a letter I had sent from there saying: “This place is so boring. There are no boys at all and the weather is terrible!” I love Ireland but my novel is set on Arran. I love it so much I thought I’d write about it.

I think the first time I was there I was about 18 months old.

It was before Mum and Dad had a car because I can remember being on the back of bikes with my brother in these amazing children’s seats.

I still go to Lamlash all the time, looking over to Holy Isle which acts as a kind of protector.

I’ve never actually reached the top of Goat Fell as I’m a glen walker more than a hill walker.

It’s just the sort of place that you go down a gear when you get there.”